No Brainers: Borderlands 2, DLC

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Borderlands 2 is probably going to happen, if comments made in this interview are to be believed. Mike Neumann told the award-looting VG247.com that “Everyone here loves the franchise, and it seems like the public is really coming back with praise and love. So yeah, if everything makes sense, Borderlands 2 seems like a no-brainer to me.”

The downloadable content, Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, will reportedly cost $10 and is out on the 24th of November (not clear if that’s for the PC). Still no patch addressing voice and connection issues though, eh? Or did I miss that? Anyway, what do you want to see in a sequel?

119 Comments

Really hoping they up the random element for the second game. The core combat is pretty solid, though they could add in proper melee combat as well for bonus points. But if the game had randomly generated caves/dugeon sections, quest items spawned in random locations, and maybe a Director-style system to control what sort of stuff you come across (So one session you might stumble upon some bandits attacking a military outpost or something, but there’s no guarantee it’ll happen).

Please, anything but randomly generated maps. They killed Hellgate: London for me, and they’d have the same effect on Borderlands.

One of the things I love about the game is the beautifully crafted world they’ve built, and that’s only possible if you have actual map designers working on things, instead of throwing a load of lego bricks into a bucket, and pulling them out at random.

I do kind of like the idea of director style random encounters, but at the same time I’m quite happy with what’s there already, with randomly spawned mobs of a suitable level.

It didn’t work for Hellgate, no. But Borderlands has an art style that’s PERFECT for it. I mean, most bandit camps use the same types of buildings. You’ll see identical rocks and Skag caves. I’m certainly not suggesting every area is random, but some of the caves (Tetanus Warrens or Skag Valley for instance) could easily be different every playthrough.

Just because Hellgate failed at it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Torchlight is a prime example, it really doesn’t look randomly generated when you play it because everything fits together so well.

My impression of Torchlight (after watching the intro to the editor videos) is that it’s designed randomness. Random which pieces actually show up in the game, but a designer places all the possible pieces.

Hmm. You know all the hubbub regarding L4D2 coming so son after L4D? I was experiencing a feeling akin to that ‘already?!’ feeling.

Maybe it’s because I’m used to expansions (and, these days, dlc) to prolong the product’s life and similarly that when a successor appears it is to replace the preceding one. This also feels more like episodic games like Telltales’.

I’d like to see advanced options, like microphone control and vertical sync!

OK, bad parody.

But on a serious note, i’d like to see more penalty for dying. I don’t really like how easy games make it these days. Bioshock with it’s ability to respawn down the last corridor without the level resetting, Borderlands is very similar. Sure i complained about having 60k of my cash taken once i had built up around a million in savings, but i’d rather have to redo the mission or something.

Forza 3 (yes, xbox, boo) is the same with its option to unlimitedly rewind the race every time you screw up. It’s terrible. “BACK IN MY DAY” we used to have to complete a game with 3 lives, and you hit would kill ya!

Saying that though, they’d also have to make it a little less easy to die. Once you have more than 2 players in co-op the enemies are scaled into an almost mini-boss state of HP (making your ubergun3000 feel like a slingshot) and damage output. I’d rather see MORE enemies than just see their stats increased. So that’s another thing i’d like.

OH yeah, post above reminded me. I’d like it to sort its own port/connection issues out a bit more, like most games do. I can deal with forwarding a couple, like you sometimes have to with other games, but any more (like the 10-ish in Borderlands) is taking the mickey. That’s a valuable minute of my time!

If you rebalanced it enough you could even include harsher death penalties in harder difficulties. Maybe even a Diablo style hardcore mode where death is final. As another possibility, you could have the player loses any item in their inventory (Not equipped) when they respawn, though it would remain at the spot where you died.

If there’s more penalty for dying, there needs to be less chance of dying instantly due to something stupid.

I think 3/4 of my deaths now involve vehicles and/or barrels in places where there’s nothing to shoot to get my second wind. Every once in a while there’s just this random death where I would swear I didn’t hit a barrel or anything but my car blew up.

I wanna see more vehicle stuff. Seriously, some of the best fun we’ve had comes from just driving around drib=ving each other (literally) up the wall. Even something like a driver or gunner mod and a few differnet vehicles (bikes, truck, etc) could really spice things up. And maybe the ability, like in some of the concept art, to leap onto vehicles and melee or shoot the people in them. So I guess an improved melee system might work too.

First and foremost I’d like the ability to send guns to and from a storage facility, like your own little house or something. They could make it so you could transfer weapons and items at the New-U station.

Secondly, more enemies on screen at once and more variety of enemies. As much as I loved the Skags, midgets and raiders, I just got sick of seeing hockey masks and 4 legged bug mammals every single time I fought something.

And lastly, better boss battles. Give your bosses some patterns at least, don’t just have them walk around doing nothing while I’m killing them; that massive vagina faced thing literally just stood in one spot while I shot at it for 5 minutes. I’d like to see more large bosses that move around, have fun patterns and aren’t just completely overpowered sponges.

Crits on bosses should serve a more important purpose, rather than just dealing bonus damage. Shooting a charging boss in the legs to make it fall over or something. Make the big fights a bit more strategic rather than just circle strafing and shooting for five minutes.

More randomnity would be nice IMO – perhaps dynamic tile-based dungeons but a fairly static overworld connecting them would work well? Though things like random bandit roadblocks or other occasional obstructions could also add some interest to maps that otherwise tend to become overly familiar.

More base types of guns and more variety of powers/buffs/debuffs on them would also be good – as you play the game more and more you start to see that they aren’t really as varied as you first think.

Also an improved interface would be handy. A combined map/quest screen that shows you all the quests waypoints at once when you mouse-over a quest, and some kind of overworld map that shows you how the zones all connect up would be great for starters. And being able to see all the stats of the guns, rather than just the first 4 lines of text – that’d be handy, right? Plus the ability to turn in-game chat on and off, etc. etc.

Yeah, and networking that works. And doesn’t delete/fail-to-save characters…

I think the first question should be what do we want to see in a patch let alone a sequel. Like PC support, slowing down the re-spawning of enemies before you’ve left an area, or at least more randomization of which enemies re-spawn.

That said in a sequel I’d like to see complete character customization, the ability to choose my gender, character model, skills, voice not just a choice between four characters and a colour scheme. Duel wielding, not really a fan of it in most games but those revolvers really cry out to be duel wielded. The ability to break weapons apart and create our own custom jobs, mixing and match parts. An AI buddy for single player. A melee system, first or third person. More variety in vehicle models and an more of an open world so we can drive between areas or just move from one area to another without having to press a damn button.

I actually quite enjoy the respawning of grunts behind you. While it’s obvious that it’s the result of perhaps unbalanced timers, it has the benefit of spicing up the trudge back to the start of the levels, and it certainly made me less complacent when moving through ‘finished’ areas.

A home base, characters with plenty of incidental dialogue, companion AI, quests that amount to a touch more than collect X of Y, combat drugs. Borderlands could do with all of the above, and a few more things from FO3 besides. It has the ‘S’ for Shooter stuff worked out, but it’s behind the curve on the ‘RP’ for Role Playing stuff.

The additions you listed, while good, are not at all what I think of when thinking of Fallout 3. I just played through it for my first time two days ago, incidentally. I assumed you wanted Borderlands to have more ugly terrain, a repetitive, drudging combat system, and laughably generic enemies with poor animation. Oh, and a preachy yet trite contrived ending.

I would love some sort of actual endgame challenge. Me and a few friends beat playthrough 2 the other day and it was almost trivial. Now there’s really nothing to do: no way to farm gear, and no reason to farm gear since I can easily kill anything in the game on the hardest difficulty. You can’t even fight the main boss again if you want to!

Hopefully Gerabox will knock out an SDK for this and all of the stuff that is so obviously possible will spring from the community. Borderlands has the potential to be as long-lived and rewarding as Stalker with the right care from the community.

Really, it’s all about longevity and breadth. Borderlands is alright, but it’s a really linear experience. Co-Op with friends breaks you out of the story (such as it was) and you end up playing the game in a really weird piecewise fashion. When you team up with friends, i’d expect more of the Arena style quests, but infinitely repeatable. As the waves increase and the difficulty goes up, so do the rewards. Make the top levels be completely infeasibly impossible, and then watch as people still work out how to get past them and reap their huge rewards.

Instead, you are forced to do occasional nice long story quests, followed by half an hour of everyone driving around so you can hand things in. MMOs get this right, you get a group together to take on particular challenges over and over. Hell, given the arcadey nature of Borderlands… put in Leaderboards for this kind of thing and you’d get people playing it non-stop.

I’d much rather group with my friends to just tear shit up in the arena, seeing if we can beat our previous best of wave 24, than everyone driving around all the time so we can hand quests in.

Yeah, I was sad that they’d ditched that feature (along with a few other ambitious ideas early previews mentioned). Guess redoing all the art in the game and deciding to go for the incredi-crazy style the game ended up as took up a lot of dev time.

Noodles, broken reply system.. that was meant to be in reply to “And maybe the ability, like in some of the concept art, to leap onto vehicles and melee or shoot the people in them. So I guess an improved melee system might work too.”

A bit better scaling in co-op later on, towards the end of our first playthrough there was barley a challenge – my solo game has been much tougher. Give the co-op players real reason to work together and use team tactics.

I guess more characters would be great, but keeping the current 4 as well. 8 player co-op! Oh and new vehicles.

Despite complaints though, I bloody love Borderlands. I wouldn’t want it made more roleplay-y (like Fallout 3). It’s pretty simple as it is and in this case simple = fun.

I’m more excited about the idea of Borderlands DLC (only just finished playthrough 1 last night) than a sequel. There were some fantastic missions in there (Krom, Old Haven) and some pretty dire ones (all the Mad Mel storyline). More intense environments like the former would be great.

That said, my purchase of any DLC is dependent on a patch or two to make the game more PC friendly. Add in an options screen, improve the interface layout slightly.

I was waiting for someone to mention Steamworks. Pitchford has spoken out against Steam, but its the closest thing to XBL/PSN on PC. The current system works awfully for pick-up co-op games: all players need to be in the game already, and if everyone’s lucky then we can all play (because of the crap GameSpy peer-to-peer code).

I’ve never had any problems with L4D’s matchmaking, even when it’s running p2p. One person can create a lobby, choose to make it public, and then can add friends in as long as those friends are running Steam.

GB hosting dedicated servers (or giving someone the option of hosting a dedicated server) would be an added bonus. Since the network topography of different players can be wildly different, sometimes just connecting to a single server is the easiest and quickest way to get it done.

Currently, I have all sorts of problems (even w/ Hamachi and/or GameRanger) connecting with friends, and I end up organizing all my games via Steam. Its just a pain in the ass with GameSpy.

I think a sequel would be a fantastic idea. There are a lot of things I keep thinking I’d like to see, that would take Borderlands from great to amazing:

Weapons: more variety (as in, more than just three elements with a few varieties in how they interact), the ability to upgrade (how many times have you found the sweetest damn rifle in the world with no scope?), more grenade variety, and melee weapons that are every bit as outlandish as the ranged ones.

Vehicles: more of them (and more enemies with them, though their difficulty ought to be varied, so that there are podunks in trucks as well as bandit raiders with supertanks). Also, more “themed” sections, like with the Dahl Headland’s Mad Max vibe. I picture a dogfighting area where you can still be on foot but you have to worry about a Red Baron-type bandit; or an archipelago area where you travel between small islands by very fast boats that are armed suspiciously well.

Environment: The only real disappointment here for me was that I could shoot little things like bottles and they would just sit there without shattering. Basic destructibility, including perhaps the spawn-huts of the bandits, would be greatly appreciated. Also, the towns are a bit desolate, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more non-enemy characters. Random instances in the world, i.e. bandits attacking mercenaries, would also be appreciated (and if not random, then just something a bit different from the repetitive identical bandit camp encounters).

Enemies: more of them, both in quantity on the field at once and quantity as in types. Random enemies would help this. I find the skags and spiderants and all those are more annoying because they take so long to spawn. When playing with friends we usually mop them up only to have another five pop out of the ground/cave/whatever. It gets a bit tedious. Just let us fight a horde of them and be done with it!

More types of guns, and a reasonable balance between them. More Eridian/exotic weapons perhaps. Whacked-out locally made weapons made of junk, since garbage seems to be Pandora’s chief natural resource. Melee weapons. Maybe the ability to salvage that sweet Crimson Lance armor.

Definitely more support for tweaking/options on the PC side. I haven’t tried to play online so I can’t comment on that.

Improvements to the map system — such as being able to scroll the thing, and see what area the transitions lead to (at least if you’ve been to them once); perhaps an area connectivity map like Hellgate had.

I’d take canning GameSpy, some ability to trade/email items to friends, an improved manner to compare weapons against various targets (a range with dummies, perhaps?), a smattering of randomly generated zones, more varieties of critters and then basically just more. More of everything they’ve done. It’s outstanding.

L4D2 demo has seen two hours of play so far, losing out to Borderlands. Ditto Dragon Age. I would never, ever have called that one. And it’s the same for the majority of the folks I play online with.

Actually, you could introduce some sort of crafting element too. All the Scavenge quests in Borderlands show guns made of the same four components: Stock or Cylinder, Barrel, Sight, and Body. Some means of breaking guns down to recieve one of those four components could provide materials, maybe also add the ability to attach unneeded Elemental Artefacts to add elemental damage.

At the very least, some guns could have slots for mods (think socketed items). Scopes to increase range, laser sights to increase accuracy, magazine expansions, and so on. Bit like Deus Ex’s old mod system, only this time guns have a limited number of upgrade slots. This way, if I find a sniper rifle that’s a bit better than my current one, but lacking in elemental damage, I could try improving it myself.

Either one could work as a way to make loot interesting even in the late game. On my second playthrough I’m finding even some yellow artefact weapons that aren’t better than the ones I already have – some use for those beyond simply topping up my massive bank balance would be nice.

I’m going to agree with this. I actually thought you could upgrade your weapon components rather than trade them out wholesale. I actually got attached to weapons to the point I’d refuse to trade them out for better ones. My excuse was that I couldn’t be *positive* the other weapon was better. I mean, sure, the damage was higher, but that’s practically meaningless!

Oh, and show more than $10M. I’m losing $4.2M a death these days, but it doesn’t really hurt, since it’s “only” out of my more-than-$10M coin jar.

1) A train that I can drive that has gun placements on the back. As soon as I started playing it I really wanted a train that I could drive in co-op, for example me driving and others manning the turrets. YES.

2) A DAMN ENDING please. The Borderlands ending is more like someone switching off the lights on the way out, rather than involving any closure at all. It’s an ellipsis not a finale. I know the story isn’t the point of the game, but after 20+ hours of shooting and the final vaginabeast it’d be nice to have something other than a 3 second video and some loot that was much worse than what I was using. Each character has a reason to be on Pandora, from finding Brick’s sister to resolving Malachi’s past, but none of that is touched upon apart from the character bio’s. Nonsense.

I’m still totally shocked about the gamespy stuff. When I launched the game I was ready to KILL every reviewer who just failed to mention that the worlds oldest and worst still existing multiplayer system (yes, worse than Games For Windows Live!) was actually used for a game. Good God is it terrible.
Game. Fucking. Spy.

I’m with Biscuit on this one i think the game content is too high to be classed like that. Also if the new game was exactly that (a new story and scenery) I’d happily buy it next week, providing they patch out the kinks from the first.

I would add a “machine civilization” that is tryiing to ignore you, but that have high trafe routers, where you can enter with one of the buggys, and try to derail one of the super-mamonth-trucks. Is that doable with this engine?
Also could be fun a minimode where you steal eggs from a big monster, then you have to run, with the monster tryiing to kill you.

In the RPG sense, it may be fun to have a “upgradeable outpost”, with turrets and stuff, maybe even a nuclear canon.

There are many issues with the interface, it requires more mouse use than I’d require. And it suffers from that fucking irritating mouse lag if your graphics card isn’t uber-powerful.

But apart from not running full-screen for me… it hasn’t crashed once. I’ve been running it windowed on a dual screen setup, rendering in Daz3d in the background and watching a video on my second monitor (I know, I bore easily). Hasn’t flinched. Gearbox can code!

I’d say a proper PC game instead of a less than mediocre port and a better AI are top priority. Now, I know those guys hate Fallout 3 and dialogue trees but a little bit of story could go a long way. As far as I’m concerned the game has no story at all, it’s impossible to care about it and I haven’t read one mission text for a long time now, i’m in “just-follow-the-green-diamond” mode almost since the beggining.
Learn from other RPG’s and make the comparison of items work better.
The AI is pretty bad, too. I’ve killed many bigger enemies quite easily just because they would get stuck somewhere and could’t hurt me. Happened all the time. If it weren’t for all that, I’d say it’s a great game. The way it is now (especially with no patching) it’s just ok.

As many above have said, this game is sadly a shoddy console port. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game and if you saw my steam profile you’d spot the 80 odd hours I’ve put into it already.
The game is not without it’s flaws, big flaws too; The menu system is dire, and shouldn’t have taken that much more work to get them up to scratch on PC. Which leads onto the missing settings for AA and vertical sync.
The network code was rushed beyond belief or they just didn’t bother, begged someone to step in and let them bodge it all, which is where Gamespy stepped in. I mean seriously, I forgot I HAD a Gamespy account! I’m truly surprised at the lack of coverage this has had in the media, especially in light of what happened with Demigod. I preempted this by forwarding my ports before the game was released (another fuck you to the PC gamers, god only knows what the game was like before the so called optimization), and always hosted a public game and quit out before hosting a private game. I had no issues until this weekend and haven’t been able to host a game since with my 3 other friends (purchased the 4 pack off Steam). Honestly, you need only go check the forums for the issues people have, for which there has been little feedback from the developer’s (sad panda time).
Tech issues out of the way, the gameplay was patchy in it’s own areas; The game just felt too easy most of the time. Boss battles suffering the most from this, as there seemed to be too many ways to glitch the bosses. You can literally walk out of the Sledge fight, recharge your shields, and open the door to pop some shots at him, before running back out. The bosses also seemed to fart about a bit too much and hardly ever posed a threat, which goes for most of the mobs too. I found that playing with Lillith, unless an enemy had a rocket launcher, it was like I was a sledge hammer toying with chestnuts. Once I had grabbed some decent weapons, I could kill anything without much effort. Now maybe the game is just that easy with Lillith, as being able to warp out of a fight, recover most of your health and get a better position is just godly, couple that with her daze effect, and well most fights are just boring.
The weapon’s shouldn’t have as big a swing on difficulty as I feel they have. Good gear makes a big difference in other RPGs, but in other RPGs you tend to need to collect a lot more than a gun, shield and class mod to become a monster. Also bosses still tend to kill you and pose some kind of challenge, getting harder as the game progresses. On my second play-through, 9 Toes was a pain as was Sledge. Skagzilla was a oh-no-I’m-going-to-spend-five-minutes-buying-ammo (buy all option please?!), and hit me maybe 6 times. And the last boss, well he didn’t even get past my shields… (sad panda). Without trying to sound too console bashy, maybe they just didn’t up the difficulty for us PC twitch freaks.
All that aside, I still love the game and really hope they fix and balance it, and really learn from the experience for Borderlands 2.

There really is no way to balance a game based on random loot. The people who find the uber loot will find things to easy, while guys with the crap loot will find it to hard.

The way to fix this is by adding more playthroughs, every play through after the 2nd, adds a level to all the enemies for each playthrough.

so while things are 48-51 after the end of playthrough 2. playthrough 3 will lvl everything up 1 more level, if you manage to beat it again, they up it another level. Hopefull during this time you are finding more loot to increase your level.

Eventually you will get to a point where all the mobs put a hurt on you and then you need to start farming for even better gear than you have before you can progress to the next playthrough.

Borderlands really screwed up progression in my mind. The only way for a player to properly stay challenged and not over-leveled is to ignore just about all side quests and only run main quests. On my first playthrough by the time we had gotten into Old Haven we were around level 33 and Crimson Lance were a joke. I did my second playthrough forgoing all secondary quests waiting for the level increase upon completion of playthrough two. I had some challenge, but it still wasn’t that great.

I think the designers made damage scale up (or down) way too quickly relative to how many levels above/below the enemy is from you. You only really have a one or two level window to get a good challenge out of any given mob/boss, and it’s nigh impossible to do more than 75% of the quests while in an ideal level for them.

Does it allow you to play with two people on the same router? The biggest problem I have now is that neither my girlfriend nor I can host other people if we’re playing as well. We have to both join someone elses game.

We’ve been playing using the standard networking without any third party app for our co-op game, and the guy that is hosting the game and his housemate are sharing an internet connection, so what you want to do is theoretically possible out of the box.

I’ll second this. It feels like you have to make a choice when you play this game, either forgo the side-quests for a greater challenge and miss out on content, or obliterate everything you come across for the sake of experiencing the game as a whole. That is just poor design really.
While it’s nice to have an incentive for multiple play throughs, I gave up on side quests entirely after level 28 in search of challenge while playing Lil, who was my single player character.
There was much more of a challenge playing the game on multiplayer, sometimes trying to solo just one mob could land you in trouble.
It would be interesting to know how they tested the game pre-release.

@Nef
I’ll second this. It feels like you have to make a choice when you play this game, either forgo the side-quests for a greater challenge and miss out on content, or obliterate everything you come across for the sake of experiencing the game as a whole. That is just poor design really.
While it’s nice to have an incentive for multiple play throughs, I gave up on side quests entirely after level 28 in search of challenge while playing Lil, who was my single player character.
There was much more of a challenge playing the game on multiplayer, sometimes trying to solo just one mob could land you in trouble.
It would be interesting to know how they tested the game pre-release.